Oil Companies; Political Patsies or Greedy Fat-cats?

I have recently noticed the building anger towards the oil companies and their ridiculous profits...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Well this got me thinking, and bear with me, because I believe this is my first researched thread, and I want to get my point across.

Americans use a huge amount of gas every day....

it shows that the United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil each day. If you look at the statistics on a page like this one, you find that a barrel of oil (which contains 42 gallons or 159 liters) will yield something like 19 or 20 gallons (75 liters) of gasoline, depending on the refinery. Therefore, in the United States, something like 400 million gallons (1.51 billion liters) of gasoline gets consumed every day.

auto.howstuffworks.com...

And profits for the last quarter were 11 Billion for one company alone.(EXXON MOBIL)
In total, there were over 120 BILLION dollars in profit by oil companies last year. So why am I calling the oil companies "Patsies"?
For one, Exxon paid over 40% of it's profits to taxes. They were the largest payers of taxes in U.S. history.
seekingalpha.com...

If you were to do the math, the oil companies make less than 1 dollar per gallon of gas, being as I cannot get the figures for overseas fuel sales by these American Companies. So not to be liberal with the math or anything, but how much profit should be taken from the very corporations who we all have stock in?

Conclusion: In other words, just one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers, which is 65,000,000 people! Further, the tax rate for the bottom 50% is only 3% of adjusted gross income ($27.4 billion / $922 billion), and the tax rate for Exxon was 41% in 2006 ($67.4 billion in taxable income, $27.9 billion in taxes).

By comparison, grocery stores RAKE in the profits on a Gallon of milk, and yet there is no uproar at the direct gouging done by those camps...

At one point in 2003, the profits that retailers earned for everygallon of milk equaled the wholesale amount farmers were paid
per gallon, Cotterill said in a report he issued on milk prices last year.

www.fmpc.uconn.edu...

So what is my point? The company that pays more taxes than the lower half of wage earners combined, is also contributing 90% of it's profits to the various mutual funds that we all own, and has raised prices 25% when costs have risen 120% for it's product.
www.eia.doe.gov...

Read the data, and if you compensate for current prices for crude, you will see that there really should be MUCH HIGHER prices for fuel right now. If it was not for our low gas taxes, there would be much more to complain about.

So what's the conspiracy? Are we deliberately being maligned so that we begin to loathe the middle east and seek some war "spoils"? With ethanol costing more than twice the cost of regular fuel, (it takes a gallon of fuel to create a gallon of ethanol) and considering it uses the same amount of corn per gallon that a human eats in an ENTIRE year, are we being pushed to create the conditions for a complete destruction of the oil producing nations, and a famine for the rest of the world that we don't want to support anymore?
I am not rich, actually fairly poor, and I drive a gas guzzler, so please avoid the bias argument. Thanks, and please be gentle....

Is it possible that the oil companies are just covers for our plans to dominate the middle east? Have you heard of the recent Anti-trust threats against OPEC?

[edit on 2-5-2008 by jasonjnelson]

Oil companies receive govt. subsidies that off set their taxes.

I'm thinking "greedy fat cats" as their lobbiest help write legislation that benifet the oil companies.




zfacts.com...

[edit on 2-5-2008 by whaaa]

Really? what are the 30 billion in subsidies that exxon got last year? A bill number, web link, anything you might have?

So this is my last boost for this topic , live or let die my tread, live or die...

Is a monday morning boost allowed for a long researched topic? I guess we'll see boys, I guess we'll see...